The world population hits its 6 billionth cell phone subscription

The International Telecommunications Union published new figures about the state of mobile usage worldwide. The big milestone here is that the entire world population has now purchased 6 billion cell phone subscriptions, two billion alone of which are from China and India.

With the global population estimated to be at a little over 7 billion, it won’t be long before we will have bought enough cell phone subscriptions to give a cell phone to every person on Earth.

The CTIA also reported some interesting statistics on just how much we’ve been using those cell phones. From July 2011 to June 2012, Americans have used 1.1 billion gigabytes of data, talked on the phone for 2.321 trillion minutes, and sent almost the same amount of text messages: 2.273 trillion. The number of minutes on the phone has increased by three percent from last year as has the number of text messages sent out.

Of the 322 million mobile phone subscriptions in America — which is more than the 314 million people in America — 41 percent of the devices in use are smartphones and 23 percent are prepaid, according to the CTIA.

As cell phone usage numbers rise, cell phone bill numbers fall. The average monthly cell phone bill has dropped a bit to $47.16. Multiply that by 12 and we’re all on average spending $565.92 on our cell phones per year.

Mobile broadband use as spiked as well. “Over the past year, growth in mobile-broadband services continued at 40 percent globally and 78 percent in developing countries,” reported the ITU. “There are now twice as many mobile-broadband subscriptions as fixed-broadband subscriptions worldwide.”